Today is not your first Valentine’s Day, but the second; this is not your first year on this Earth anymore, but year number two, and I have to tell you, kid, I don’t know what I would do without you. You are my heart, my soul, my reason for breathing, for pushing, for changing. You are helping me take shape in a way I cannot explain—I am becoming a man that I was not before, becoming a person who wants to, who can, who will succeed, for you.

You, my baby, are my inspiration, my muse, my eternal devotion, and my tiniest of friends. Your love means to me something that I could never put into words—thus I do not know why I am attempting to do just so. I think it’s because I want you to have this, to look at, to reflect on, and to see just how much you meant to me, once upon a time. I hope that when you read this in the coming years you look to me and you know that I love you even more then. More than I can express that I do now, in 2018, while you’re still just an itty-bitty toddler, running around in your diaper, screaming, “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” at the top of your lungs in excitement.

Emmy, you hold the key to everything that is me. My success, my failure, my drive, my passions, my life—they all hinge on you. You see, when you came into this world, something inside me changed. I felt a shift at the very first moment I saw your beautiful face, the instant I heard your incredibly precious cry, the nanosecond that I first got to hold you after you were birthed into this world from your mother—in that moment I knew that something was different. At that time I felt that something had changed inside of me, forever.